Critical Writing, Critical Meaning, Critical Making: Zines and Other Multimodal Composing in the Center
with Trixie Smith, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, and Rachel Robinson
Our goal in the writing center is to help students improve their writing/composing in all forms for a variety of purposes and audiences; consequently, centers are continuing to challenge the boundaries of what counts as writing, emphasizing and supporting multimodal writing, maker culture, and writing/making for change (see Sheridan, Sheridan and Inman, Carpenter and Souhi, Shipka, Arola, among others). One genre that captures this turn is the zine. Zines are self-published or small press publications that have a handmade ethos that might include personal and political writings, collage, comics, drawings, rants, ephemera, and much more (see Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism and The Zine Resource Guide). Zine making is a practice of multimodal/embodied writing, which produces better writing all around, including academic writing (see Bishop, the Alt/Dis collection, and Pahl and Rowsell for example); it is also a form of community engaged composition, communication, and scholarship.
In this workshop we provide an overview of zines as writing for social change, including a brief history of zines in queer and feminist activism, as well as their role in the writing center. We will spend the bulk of the workshop making various types of zine pages to be digitized and compiled into a 2017 IWCA zine that will be distributed via social media. Materials will be provided, but we also encourage folks to collect and bring their own materials to contribute as well.
with Trixie Smith, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, and Rachel Robinson
Our goal in the writing center is to help students improve their writing/composing in all forms for a variety of purposes and audiences; consequently, centers are continuing to challenge the boundaries of what counts as writing, emphasizing and supporting multimodal writing, maker culture, and writing/making for change (see Sheridan, Sheridan and Inman, Carpenter and Souhi, Shipka, Arola, among others). One genre that captures this turn is the zine. Zines are self-published or small press publications that have a handmade ethos that might include personal and political writings, collage, comics, drawings, rants, ephemera, and much more (see Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism and The Zine Resource Guide). Zine making is a practice of multimodal/embodied writing, which produces better writing all around, including academic writing (see Bishop, the Alt/Dis collection, and Pahl and Rowsell for example); it is also a form of community engaged composition, communication, and scholarship.
In this workshop we provide an overview of zines as writing for social change, including a brief history of zines in queer and feminist activism, as well as their role in the writing center. We will spend the bulk of the workshop making various types of zine pages to be digitized and compiled into a 2017 IWCA zine that will be distributed via social media. Materials will be provided, but we also encourage folks to collect and bring their own materials to contribute as well.
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